Robots Have No Tails

by Henry Kuttner

Overview

A complete collection of Galloway Gallegher stories from “one of the major names in science fiction” (The New York Times).
 
In this comprehensive collection, Henry Kuttner is back with Galloway Gallegher, his most beloved character in the stories that helped make him famous. Gallegher is a binge-drinking scientist who’s a genius when drunk and totally clueless sober. Hounded by creditors and government officials, he wakes from each bender to discover a new invention designed to solve all his problems—if only he knew how it worked . . .
 
Add a vain and uncooperative robot assistant, a heckling grandfather, and a host of uninvited guests—from rabbit-like aliens to time-traveling mafia lawyers to his own future corpse—and Gallegher has more on his hands than even he can handle. Time for another drink!
 
“[A] pomegranate writer: popping with seeds—full of ideas.” —Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 421

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781626814011
Publisher:	Diversion Books
Publication date:	09/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	536,676
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Henry Kuttner was, alone and in collaboration with his wife, the great science fiction and fantasy writer C. L. Moore, one of the five most important writers of the 1940s, the writer whose work went furthest in its sociological and psychological insight to making science fiction a human as well as technological literature. He was an important influence upon every contemporary and every science fiction writer who succeeded him. In the early 1940s and under many pseudonyms, Kuttner and Moore published very widely through the range of the science fiction and fantasy pulp markets.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Time Locker

Gallegher played by ear, which would have been all right had he been a musician — but he was a scientist. A drunken and erratic one, but good. He'd wanted to be an experimental technician, and would have been excellent at it, for he had a streak of genius at times. Unfortunately, there had been no funds for such specialized education, and now Gallegher, by profession an integrator machine supervisor, maintained his laboratory purely as a hobby. It was the damnedest-looking lab in six states. Gallegher had once spent months building what he called a liquor organ, which occupied most of the space. He could recline on a comfortable padded couch and, by manipulating buttons, siphon drinks of marvelous quantity, quality, and variety down his scarified throat. Since he had made the liquor organ during a protracted period of drunkenness, he never remembered the basic principles of its construction. In a way, that was a pity.

There was a little of everything in the lab, much of it incongruous. Rheostats had little skirts on them, like ballet dancers, and vacuously grinning faces of clay. A generator was conspicuously labeled, "Monstro," and a much smaller one rejoiced in the name of "Bubbles." Inside a glass retort was a china rabbit, and Gallegher alone knew how it had got there. Just inside the door was a hideous iron dog, originally intended for Victorian lawns or perhaps for hell, and its hollowed ears served as sockets for test tubes.

"But how do you do it?" Vanning asked.

Gallegher, his lank form reclining under the liquor organ, siphoned a shot of double martini into his mouth.

"Huh?"

"You heard me. I could get you a swell job if you'd use that screwball brain of yours. Or even learn to put up a front."

"Tried it," Gallegher mumbled. "No use. I can't work when I concentrate, except at mechanical stuff. I think my subconscious must have a high I.Q."

Vanning, a chunky little man with a scarred, swarthy face, kicked his heels against Monstro. Sometimes Gallegher annoyed him. The man never realized his own potentialities, or how much they might mean to Horace Vanning, Commerce Analyst. The "commerce," of course, was extra-legal, but the complicated trade relationships of the day left loopholes a clever man could slip through. The fact of the matter was, Vanning acted in an advisory capacity to crooks. It paid well. A sound knowledge of jurisprudence was rare in these days; the statues were in such a tangle that it took years of research before one could even enter a law school. But Vanning had a staff of trained experts, a colossal library of transcripts, decisions, and legal data, and, for a suitable fee, he could have told Dr. Crippen how to get off scot-free.

The shadier side of his business was handled in strict privacy, without assistants. The matter of the neuro-gun, for example —

Gallegher had made that remarkable weapon, quite without realizing its function. He had hashed it together one evening, piecing out the job with court plaster when his welder went on the fritz. And he'd given it to Vanning, on request. Vanning didn't keep it long. But already he had earned thousands of credits by lending the gun to potential murderers. As a result, the police department had a violent headache.

A man in the know would come to Vanning and say, "I heard you can beat a murder rap. Suppose I wanted to —"

"Hold on! I can't condone anything like that."

"Huh? But —"

"Theoretically, I suppose a perfect murder might be possible. Suppose a new sort of gun had been invented, and suppose — just for the sake of an example — it was in a locker at the Newark Stratoship Field."

"Huh?"

"I'm just theorizing. Locker Number Seventy-nine, combination thirty-blue-eight. These little details always help one to visualize a theory, don't they?"

"You mean —"

"Of course if our murderer picked up this imaginary gun and used it, he'd be smart enough to have a postal box ready, addressed to ... say ... Locker Forty, Brooklyn Port. He could slip the weapon into the box, seal it, and get rid of the evidence at the nearest mail conveyor. But that's all theorizing. Sorry I can't help you. The fee for an interview is three thousand credits. The receptionist will take your check."

Later, conviction would be impossible. Ruling 857-M, Illinois Precinct, case of State vs. Dupson, set the precedent. Cause of death must be determined. Element of accident must be considered. As Chief Justice Duckett had ruled during the trial of Sanderson vs. Sanderson, which involved the death of the accused's mother-in-law —

Surely the prosecuting attorney, with his staff of toxicological experts, must realize that —

And in short, your honor, I must respectfully request that the case be dismissed for lack of evidence and proof of casus mortis —

Gallegher never even found out that his neuro-gun was a dangerous weapon. But Vanning haunted the sloppy laboratory, avidly watching the results of his friend's scientific doodling. More than once he had acquired handy little devices in just this fashion. The trouble was, Gallegher wouldn't work.

He took another sip of martini, shook his head, and unfolded his lanky limbs. Blinking, he ambled over to a cluttered workbench and began toying with lengths of wire.

"Making something?"

"Dunno. Just fiddling. That's the way it goes, I put things together, and sometimes they work. Trouble is, I never know exactly what they're going to do. Tsk!" Gallegher dripped the wires and returned to his couch. "Hell with it."

He was, Vanning reflected, an odd duck. Gallegher was essential amoral, thoroughly out of place in this too-complicated world. He seemed to watch, with a certain wry amusement, from a vantage point of his own, rather disinterested for the most part. And he made things —

But always and only for his own amusement. Vanning sighed and glanced around the laboratory, his orderly soul shocked by the mess. Automatically he picked up a rumpled smock from the floor, and looked for a hook. Of course there was none. Gallagher, running short of conductive metal, had long since ripped them out and used them in some gadget or other.

The so-called scientist was creating a zombie, his eyes half-closed. Vanning went over to a metal locker in one corner and opened the door. There were no hooks, but he folded the smock neatly and laid it on the floor of the locker.

Then he went back to his perch on Monstro.

"Have a drink?" Gallagher asked. Vanning shook his head. "Thanks, no. I've got a case coming up tomorrow."

"There's always thiamin. Filthy stuff. I work better when I've got pneumatic cushions around my brain."

"Well I don't."

"It is purely a matter of skill," Gallagher hummed, "to which each may attain if he will ... What are you gaping at?"

"That — locker," Vanning said, frowning in a baffled way. "What the —" He got up. The metal door hadn't been securely latched and had swung open. Of the smock Vanning had placed within the metal compartment there was no trace.

"It's the paint," Gallegher explained swiftly. "Or the treatment. I bombarded it with gamma rays. But it isn't good for anything."

Vanning went over and swung a fluorescent into a more convenient position. The locker wasn't empty, as he had first imagined. The smock was no longer there, but instead there was a tiny blob — something, pale green and roughly spherical.

"It melts things?" Vanning asked, staring.

"Uh-huh. Pull it out. You'll see."

Vanning felt hesitant about putting his hand inside the locker. Instead, he found a long pair of test tube clamps and tossed the blob out. It was —

Vanning hastily looked away. His eyes hurt. The green blob was changing in color, shape and size. A crawling nongeometrical blur of motion rippled over it. Suddenly, the clamps were remarkably heavy.

No wonder. They were gripping the original smock.

"It does that, you know," Gallagher said absently. "Must be a reason, too. I put things in the locker and they get small. Take 'em out, and they get big again. I supposed I could sell it to a stage magician." His voice sounded doubtful.

Vanning sat down, fingering the smock and staring at the metal locker. It was a cube, approximately 3 × 3 × 5, lined with what seemed to be a grayish paint, sprayed on. Outside it was shiny black.

"How'd you do it?"

"Huh? I dunno. Just fiddling around." Gallagher sipped his zombie. "Maybe it's a matter of dimensional exorcism. My treatment may have altered the spatiotemporal relationships inside the locker. I wonder what that means?" he murmured in a vague aside. "Words frighten me sometimes."

Vanning was thinking about tesseracts. "You mean it's bigger inside than it is outside?"

"A paradox, a paradox, a most delightful paradox. You tell me. I suppose the inside of the locker isn't in this space time continuum at all. Here, shove that bench in it.

You'll see." Gallagher made no moves to rise; he waved toward the article of furniture in question.

"You're crazy. That bench is bigger than the locker."

"So it is. Shove it in a bit at a time. That corner first. Go ahead."

Vanning wrestled with the bench. Despite his shortness, he was stockily muscular.

"Lay the locker on its back. It'll be easier."

"I ... uh! ... O.K. Now what?"

"Edge the bench down into it."

Vanning squinted at his companion, shrugged, and tried to obey. Of course the bench wouldn't go into the locker. One corner did, that was all. Then, naturally, the bench stopped, balancing precariously at an angle.

"Well?"

"Wait."

The bench moved. It settled slowly, downward. As Vanning's jaw dropped, the bench seemed to crawl into the locker, with the gentled motion of a not-too-heavy object sinking through water. It wasn't sucked down. It melted down. The portion still outside the locker was unchanged. But that too settled, and was gone.

Vanning craned forward. A blur of movement had his eyes. Inside the locker was — something. It shifted its contours, shrank, and became a spiky sort of scalene pyramid, deep purple in hue.

It seemed to be less than four inches across at its widest point.

"I don't believe it." Vanning said. Gallegher grinned, "As the Duke of Wellington remarked to the subaltern, it was a demned small bottle, sir."

"Now wait a minute. How the devil could I put an eight-foot bench inside a five-foot locker?"

"Because of Newton," Gallegher said. "Gravity. Go fill a test tube with water and I'll show you."

"Wait a minute ... O.K. Now what?"

"Got it brim full? Good. You'll find some sugar cubes in that drawer labeled FUSES. Lay a cube on top of the test tube, one corner down so it touches the water."

Vanning racked the tube and obeyed. "Well?"

"What do you see?"

"Nothing. The sugar's getting wet. And melting."

"So there you are," Gallegher said expansively. Vanning gave him a brooding look and turned back to the tube. The cube of sugar was slowly dissolving and melting down.

Presently it was gone.

"Air and water are different physical conditions. In air a sugar cube can exist as a sugar cube. In water it exists in solution. The corner of it extending into water is subject to aqueous conditions. So it alters physically, though not chemically. Gravity does the rest."

"Make it clearer."

"The analogy's clear enough, no? The water represents the particular conditions existing inside that locker. The sugar cube represents the workbench. Now! The sugar soaked up the water and gradually dissolved it, so gravity could pull the cube down into the tube as it melted. See?"

"I think so. The bench soaked up the ... the x condition inside the locker, eh? A condition that shrunk the bench —"

"In partis, not in toto. A little at a time. You can shove a human body into a small container of sulphuric acid, bit by bit."

"Oh," Vanning said, regarding the cabinet askance. "Can you get the bench out again?"

"Do it yourself. Just reach in and pull it out."

"Reach in? I don't want my hand to melt!"

"It won't. The action isn't instantaneous. You saw that yourself. It takes a few minutes for the change to take place. You can reach into the locker without any ill effects, if you don't leave your hand exposed to the conditions for more than a minute or so. I'll show you." Gallegher languidly arose, looked around, and picked up an empty demijohn. He dropped this into the locker.

The change wasn't immediate. It occurred slowly, the demijohn altering its shape and size till it was a distorted cube the apparent size of a cube of sugar. Gallegher reached down and brought it up again, placing the cube on the floor.

It grew. It was a demijohn again.

"Now the bench. Look out."

Gallegher rescued the little pyramid. Presently it became the original workbench.

"You see? I'll bet a storage company would like this. You could probably pack all the furniture in Brooklyn in here, but there'd be the trouble in getting what you wanted out again. The physical change, you know —"

"Keep a chart," Vanning suggested absently. "Draw a picture of how the thing looks inside the locker, and note down what it was."

"The legal brain," Gallegher said. "I want a drink." He returned to his couch and clutched the siphon in a grip of death.

"I'll give you six credits for the thing." Vanning offered.

"Sold. It takes up too much room anyway. Wish I could put it inside itself. The scientist chuckled immoderately. "That's very funny."

"Is it?" Vanning said. "Well, here you are." He took credit coupons from his wallet. "Where'll I put this dough?"

"Stuff it into Monstro. He's my bank ... Thanks."

"Yeah. Say, elucidate this sugar business a bit, will you? It isn't just gravity that affects the cube so it slips into a test tube. Doesn't the water soak up into the sugar —"

"You're right at that. Osmosis. No, I'm wrong. Osmosis has something to do with eggs. Or is that ovulation? Conduction, convection — absorption! Wish I'd studied physics, then I'd know the right words. Just a mad genius, that's me. I shall take the daughter of the Vine to spouse," Gallegher finished incoherently and sucked at the siphon.

"Absorption." Vanning scowled. "Only not water being soaked up by the sugar. The ... the conditions existing inside the locker, being soaked up by your workbench — in that particular case."

"Like a sponge or a blotter."

"The bench?"

"Me," Gallegher said succinctly, and relapsed into a happy silence, broken by occasional gurgles as he poured liquor down his scarified gullet. Vanning sighed and touched the locker. He carefully closed and latched the door before lifting the metal cabinet in his muscular arms.

"Going? G'night. Fare thee well, fare thee well —"

"Night."

"Fare — thee — well!" Gallegher ended in a melancholy outburst of tunefulness, as he turned over preparatory to going to sleep.

Vanning sighed again and let himself out into the coolness of the night. Stars blazed in the sky, except toward the south, where the aurora of Lower Manhattan dimmed them. The glowing white towers of skyscrapers rose in a jagged pattern. A sky-ad announced the virtues of Vambulin — It Peps You Up.

His speeder was at the curb. Vanning edged the locker into the trunk compartment and drove toward the Hudson Floatway, the quickest route downtown. He was thinking about Poe.

The Purloined Letter, which had been hidden in plain sight, but refolded and readdressed, so that its superficial appearance was changed. Holy Hecate! What a perfect safe the locker would make! No thief could crack it, for the obvious reason that it wouldn't be locked. No thief would want to clean it out. Vanning could fill the locker with credit coupons and instantly they'd become unrecognizable. It was the ideal cache.

How the devil did it work?

There was little use in asking Gallegher. He played by ear. A primrose by the river's rim a simple primrose was to him — not Primula vulgaris. Syllogisms were unknown to him. He reached the conclusion without the aid of either major or minor premises.

Vanning pondered. Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Ergo, there was a different sort of space in the locker —

But Vanning was jumping at conclusions. There was another answer — the right one. He hadn't guessed it yet.

Instead he tooled the speeder downtown to the office building where he maintained a floor, and brought the locker upstairs in the freight lift. He didn't put it in his private office; that would have been too obvious. He placed the metal cabinet in one of the storerooms, sliding a file cabinet in front of it for partial concealment. It wouldn't do to have the clerks using this particular locker.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Robots Have No Tails"
by .
Copyright © 1952 Henry Kuttner.
Excerpted by permission of Diversion Publishing Corp..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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